I dunnit!
Cut down my first set of lines, ever. another newbie journey's first. ^^
Little fumbles:
- no measuring tape longer than 33feet.
wanted to make a 50ft lineset, measured 30ft, marked the lines, and then plus 20ft, marked the lines for 50ft, then plus 1ft, marked it again for sleeve.
- no proper sleeving tool
o m g this was the headache. but i figured it out.
3 out of the 4 lines, thank you Mr.Barresi for the Equilizing Lines video, it came to play here so valuable knowledge I never thought I would need this seriously. Untied the knots on the sleeves, grabbed the line that poked out the other end to prevent it from slipping back into the sleeve. Phew. Did this for the 3 lines, slid the sleeve down 70ft of line to my 50ft mark I made before.
Then the 4th and last line, was cut already (about 2ft in) from group flying previously. So the sleeve was separated from the "main line" and I could not employ the slip-n-slide trick done for the previous 3 lines.
I first tried larksheading the broken line end to each other, thinking I could pull the line through the sleeve this way (like holding hands!). The resulting knot was too big to squeeze through the sleeve :l
Scrambled through all my hobby kits at home to find some kind of wire, long and thin enough for the sleeve. Best I could find was rubber-insulated wire. Skinny enough, smooth enough, to shimmy through the sleeve. But that got real messy real fast. Rubber-insulated wires are actually a bunch of tiny wires twisted or clumped tightly together then wrapped or packed tightly in the rubber insulation. Rubber started slipping fast and the tiny wires started poking through everywhere the sleeve, knotting the sleeve braids up. UGH.
So I tried super gluing the rubber wire tip, no more slip, smooth point tip, excellent!
No, didn't work, glue still tore and little tiny wires got all pokey again.
I tried a paper clip next, too fat.
Then I found bread wire, the kind of short twisty wire they use to bundle your new cables with. Stripped it and used that inner wire, perfect, skinny enough and smooth single wire pointed tip. Made a loop at one end of the wire for the kite line to be threaded through.
But that loop made a sharp tip pointing up, snags the braids on the sleeve again as I tried to thread through the sleeve. Sigh. So close yet so far.
Used tape to tape down that loop, smoothing out the little wire's profile.
Voila.
Threaded the line all the way through the sleeve with the bread wire.
All 4 lines cut and sleeved, went out to test fly and all went great. 50ft didn't seem short enough after all, I was picturing an even shorter set.
Still have like 60ish ft remaining line after cutting 50ft, going to make a 30ft and 20ft and 10ft from it.
Where do I buy kite sleeving from? What's the one LPG or KiteShoppe uses?
Great tip for other newbies, watch JB's tutorial videos! Never know when it'll come in handy!
Thanks for reading, til next time ((: